By: Jon Bream

Jakob Dylan decided to become a songwriter so he could be in a rock band. He never set out to be a rock star.

Nonetheless, stardom came because of his songs, his voice, his band the Wallflowers and, to his embarrassment, his Lake Superior-blue eyes, which jump out on the video screen and from magazine covers.

The Wallflowers: Michael Ward, Mario Calire, Greg Richling, Jakob Dylan, and Rami Jaffee. "Jakob's eyes are worth more than all my fun keyboards," the Wallflowers' Rami Jaffee told Rolling Stone last month.

"I had to have a little talk with him after that," Dylan said by phone last week. "'Why don't you just worry about your instrument, buddy?' No. I've been friends with Rami for 12 years. I think people may want to start noting that it's not the eyes, it's just that my hair's really dark. I wish they'd talk about my ears more, to tell you the truth."

Dylan has a droll sense of humor. If you get to know him, it's part of his natural personality; but it's also a natural defense mechanism, a self-protective game he plays with the press. His father, Bob Dylan, has played a version of the same game since the mid-'60s. Both want to protect their privacy and control their image, letting their songs speak for themselves.

Press the younger Dylan, however, and he'll 'fess up about the eyes.

"It's flattering to some extent, but if you don't put good things on the records, it's irrelevant," said Dylan, who became famous three years ago with the Grammy-winning, 4-million-selling CD "Bringing Down the Horse," featuring the mainstream-rock hits "6th Avenue Heartache" and "One Headlight."

Wallflowers guitarist Michael Ward is more direct: "A lot of success is off of MTV and this image thing, and so I'm sure those baby blues went a long way. [But] I think the thing that really helps this band is it's based on quality. It's not faddish or fake. It's all built on solid songs and solid playing."

Dylan tried to "write simpler" on the Wallflowers' third and latest album, "Breach." The words are more direct. There's less use of imagery and metaphor, "and it's a little more personal," Ward said.

One song that has grabbed attention is "Hand Me Down," in which the son of a cultural icon talks about trying to follow in his father's path. "You won't ever amount to much," Dylan sings. "How could you think you would be enough?"

"When people say this new record is suddenly 'I'm very comfortable and confessional, and I'm going to talk about my family finally,' it's really only one song," he said. "I've never said it is or it isn't. At the same time, I'm fine with that. The stuff is meant to be interpreted."

ALL IN THE FAMILY

Dylan isn't the only second-generation family member to become a singer/songwriter -- a career that his father virtually invented. His cousin, Seth Zimmerman of Minneapolis, fronts the local band Tangletown. His brother-in-law, St. Louis Park-bred Peter Himmelman, who now lives in Los Angeles, has been making music for two decades.

"Everybody does their own thing; it's not the Partridge Family where everyone trades ideas," said Dylan, whose parents, Bob and Sara (about whom Bob wrote "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands"), divorced when he was 7. "It's not really interconnected.

"I think if you go to any given grade school right now, you're going to find that half of the kids, boys particularly, take guitar lessons or piano or drum lessons. ... It's only over time that people get distracted and uninterested. The ratio of 15-year-old kids who want to play music is high. In my [immediate] family, it was one out of five."

Dylan's sister, Maria, who's married to Himmelman, is a lawyer. As for his other siblings, Jesse is a video director, Sam is a photographer, and Anna is a visual artist.

"This is all I wanted to do," Dylan said. "It didn't occur to me that it was a job. That didn't occur to me until I was 18 or so, where I realized that if I wanted to be as good as I hoped to be, I'd have to do it all day long, which meant I wasn't going to have time to have an actual day-to-day job. Well, it is the job of a troubadour."

MINNESOTA ROOTS

Dylan, who turns 31 next month, visited Minnesota often while he was growing up. His late grandmother lived in St. Paul, his uncle and aunt live in Buffalo, and his father has maintained a farm in the western exurbs.

"I've spent most of my time in Los Angeles," Dylan said, "but it's not a hometown for anybody. It belongs to everybody and doesn't really have its own personality. Minnesota, I've spent a lot of time there. It's close to roots that I have. I've gone there almost every year since I was 3 or 4 years old."

He remembers seeing lots of shows -- Squeeze, the Psychedelic Furs, Elvis Costello, "Beatlemania" -- at the Orpheum Theatre, which his father owned for a while in the '70s and '80s.

He also waxes eloquent about a certain Minnesota singer/songwriter -- not Bob Dylan, but the Replacements' Paul Westerberg.

"I discovered the Replacements when I liked the Clash and X and Elvis Costello. I was drawn to the songs," Dylan said. "I thought it was fascinating that you had this ragamuffin clown group, yet these songs were seeping through that were really stunning. Like '16 Blue,' 'Androgynous,' 'My Favorite Thing.' I found it very interesting that he didn't want to admit that he liked writing songs or that he might be good. He also seemed to be the last guy who [you'd think] could rock as hard as anybody could in a band -- much more so than what groups are doing today. At the same time his stuff wasn't overtly macho."

Raise the topic of his dad and the voluble Dylan becomes circumspect. He never refers to Bob Dylan by name or as his father, but merely as "he."

When was the last time the son presented one of his songs to dad before recording it?

"I don't do that. I don't do that for anybody," Dylan said. "I record my songs in one form or another, and then I give them to people I care about to get ideas. Early on and still today, I'd give him rough versions of things to see what he thinks. It doesn't mean anything bigger -- or smaller -- than that."

Years ago, he discussed songwriting with his father, but "most of it wasn't conversational." It was more about sitting around listening to records. "You have to have instincts," he said. "Buying songwriters' books has never worked for me. A lot of things you have to figure out by yourself."

When Dylan realized he didn't have long enough fingers to become a guitar player, he set his sights on being a songwriter. "There's no great motivation other than it feels right," he said. "In this day, to say you aspire to do much more than that, or you're going to make the world a better place or you're going to change the world, I think it's all nonsense. We've had a lot of great people who've tried that. I don't take that responsibility. I'm just here to write music and play records for people who respond to that."

No matter how the people respond, he won't explain his songs. "I don't get into telling people what my songs are about or not about or correcting them, or guiding them in any directions. The songs are supposed to be interpreted," he said. "You get four minutes to tell your story in a song and then you take 10 minutes to tell your story in an interview. If you can't get the job done in four minutes, maybe you need to rethink whether or not your point's coming across."

After spending 2½ years touring to promote "Bringing Down the Horse," Dylan retreated for five months because he didn't know what to write about -- though he knew it wasn't going to be success or life on the road. He spent time with his wife of eight years, Paige, and their three sons, the youngest of whom was born in September. That return to the real world led to the critically acclaimed "Breach."

While Dylan was in a backstage office talking about the new CD and the week-old tour, his band was carrying on with a pre-concert sound check in Sacramento. The guys played a series of songs by the Who -- "Substitute," "Can't Explain." Judging from recent shows, the Wallflowers are likely to play a Who song during tonight's concert in Minneapolis. Might it be "Behind Blue Eyes"?